Prototype
Just finished up our Prototype sprint and things are looking good. Not too much to write about for this post, we are starting to get into the phase of development where the team members put their heads down and start to work. I am mainly looking at the plans and schedule I put in place to ensure we will be able to meet our end goal. Not too much for the Quick hit section, but I do have a few good closer looks to…umm, look at.
A closer look - A hybrid team
Some of you might have noticed that in my last post, there as a message from Ursula that the school was giving students the option to work remotely for the remainder of the year. One of my team members, Alejandro, is using this program to improve his learning situation. He brought this to my attention during the final week of pre-production. Then we told the team about it during the next Sprint Retrospective.
My biggest concern with Alejandro going remote was that I wanted to keep the team camaraderie that we had built up over the past few weeks. I feared that with him not being in-person some of those relationships will fade and he would feel like the outsider. One of the first things I said to him, after he told me of his decision, was that I wanted him to immediately tell me if he ever felt like he was not part of the team. The work he is doing was just as important as anyone else on the project as well as his happiness. He assured me that he had no problem letting me know if he ever felt that way.
This past week, March 30th to April 1st, was the first week that the team was physically in class and Alejandro was online. It started off great. Ryan took it upon himself and brought things from home to help communicate with Alejandro from class. These mainly being a webcam and headset to talk. This simple gesture showed me that other team members saw there was an opportunity to keep the team strong and took action to make sure that it did.
We are still learning how to best do this hybrid thing as a team. The initial plan was that I would call Alejandro and put him on speaker phone as we held our meetings while screensharing whatever information we were going over. Cellphone reception within the school is not the best. So, our first couple calls took some time and were a little awkward. Ryan stepped in again and offered his personal laptop to be the stand-in for Alejandro. We used the laptop’s webcam and speakers to communicate with him while I used a nearby computer to run the screenshare. Those meetings worked a lot better. We have also used the WIP channel on our Teams group to keep Alejandro informed of the progress each team member was making. The goal is that these little steps help keep the team together and motivated to do great work.
Prototype feedback
With the completion of the prototype sprint, we now have a product that we can test and verify the goals we set out to achieve. I am proud of the team’s ability to put out this much content, at this quality, in such a short amount of time. For reference, prototype was two weeks long consisting of two and a half days of work per week. In essence, this is a week of work from the team.
With this build we wanted to demonstrate our vision for the art style, what a boss fight would look like and the random level generation. To see if we were hitting our goals, we needed the player’s feedback.
I wanted to create a feedback form that our fellow students would fill out and let us know if we were heading in the correct direction. Knowing that a lot of the mechanics of the game were not completed yet, I wanted to focus on bigger overarching things and not anything super specific at this stage of development. Below is the list of questions I asked.
Crimson Herbicide prototype feedback form
How would you rate the overall experience?
What was your favorite moment or aspect of this build?
Was there something that you wanted to do in the game that you were not able to?
What are your thoughts on the boss mechanics?
What was your impression of the lighting and mood in the boss arena?
What are your thoughts on the art style?
How would you describe this game to a friend?
If you could, what is something you would change about this game?
Any other thoughts or feedback you would like to provide?
I wanted to ask open ended questions to get some more information out of the player. I wanted to minimize the number of answers that could be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Again, at this stage of development, I wanted to confirm we were headed in the right direction and was not too worried about smaller specific details. Below is a condensed version of some of the 24 responses we received.
How would you rate the overall experience? - Four 5-stars, Ten 4-stars, Nine 3-stars and One 2-star
What was your favorite moment or aspect of this build? - Lighting, art style, boss fight and colors were their favorite parts.
Was there something that you wanted to do in the game that you were not able to? - A map, better movement and more weapons.
What are your thoughts on the boss mechanics? - Fun, interesting and too easy.
What was your impression of the lighting and mood in the boss arena? - Great at setting the mood, amazing and was a little too dark.
What are your thoughts on the art style? - Most people loved the contrast with the light and dark. A few called it generic.
How would you describe this game to a friend? - “Cyberpunk fork simulator” by far my favorite feedback comment.
If you could, what is something you would change about this game? - A map (players were getting lost), better jump and more enemies.
Any other thoughts or feedback you would like to provide? - Players wanted us to show off more of the rouge-like aspects of the game.
Conclusion
Overall, it was good feedback. What I am really happy with was that most of the developmental feedback we got, we either already knew about or we already had a plan in place to address it. For example, a lot of the players were getting lost in the randomly generated sections. The generator we use has the ability to trace a line from the start to the end of each level. As of this writing, we have not decided on how we wanted to implement that into the level and communicate that information to the player. We feel like once we get that taken care of, players will be able to follow the path and not get lost. Clearly there is more to talk about in regard to all the feedback, but I don’t think this it the correct place to get really into the weeds.
A closer look - Shift to SIX
During the first week of pre-production, it was brought to my attention that later in development, we would have the opportunity to submit our game to Seattle Indies Expo (SIX) for review. This was a chance to get our game to a larger audience and be a stage to show off my teammate’s work. Hopefully giving them a better chance of landing a job within the industry sooner rather than later. At the time Aaron, my instructor, informed me that our game would need to be finished earlier than what the school required and that was something to take into consideration. Knowing that this would be something my team would want to shoot for, I talked to them about it during our sprint retrospective meeting at the end of pre-production. During that conversation, I told them about this chance to put our work on a larger stage, talked to them about the shortened timeline and most importantly, I talked about how if we did this there would be no crunch. No team member would feel like they needed to work more than they wanted to. I gave them all of prototype sprint to think about it before we committed. The decision would be down to the team and would need unanimous support for us to go for SIX. I laid down the proverbial gauntlet, wanting to see if the team picked it up.
The team did not disappoint! The team had about two weeks to think about the project. We were also waiting on some additional information about SIX before I put it to the team. That additional information was things such as the exact submit date and what we required buy Seattle Indies and out school.
I received that information on March 24th and presented it to the team that afternoon. During that meeting I went over the items that would be required for submission. This included a build of the game, a game trailer, and a game website. So far so good. The crux of SIX was the due date, June 17, a whole three weeks sooner than our original production plan. I know three weeks does not sound like a lot of time, but it represented about 20% of our remaining development time. This was not something to take lightly.
I know I have not gone into too much detail on this blog about the specifics of Crimson Herbicide itself. I also know that from an outside perspective, we are making a very large vertical slice. We are currently planning on an introduction scene, three randomly generated levels, each with their own unique boss, and a dungeon crawler mode.
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But I know that team can easily do it with our initial timeframe. Keeping The Triangle in mind, we have a deadline we could not move and quality we did not want to compromise. So that just leaves content. Where were we going to find 20% of our game to cut? This was our main talking point for our meeting in the afternoon on the 24th. This conversation went on for some time. With no one really wanting to cut something from the game. It was hard to find that 20% of content to cut. For example, the random generator was already built, so once we had enough prefab rooms created, there was no reason not to reuse those assets to make 2, 3, or 10 levels. The majority of our work would have been front loaded then all additional content was easily replicated. So, we did not want to cut 20% from each level. This went on for a little while, like I said, until…
Ryan came to the rescue. He proposed a demo of a demo. For SIX we only have the first level playable fully done. The only things that would be missing from the SIX build would be level two and three, including their bosses, and the dungeon crawler mode. A lot of production time could be saved by moving the boss 2 and 3 later in the development cycle. The team instantly responded to this. We were not cutting work; we were just rearranging its priority.
What I learned from this experience was that I was looking at the problem in the right terms. I had this pizza that I wanted to cook. I did not want to make it 20% smaller because I wanted the same number of toppings still on the pizza. To Ryan’s point, I should have been focusing on the individual slice and making sure that slice had everything we needed on it. So, the SIX build will be 1/3rd of a pizza. The final build will be the whole thing.
As of writing this, I am in the process of changing our production schedule and project tracking software to take into account this shift to SIX. I am about 90% done with that process but I think I will wait until the next blog post to talk about it.
